The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.

A Nato membership action plan – straight from the war room of Dr Strangelove – is General Breedlove's gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. "Rapid Trident" will put US troops on Ukraine's Russian border and "Sea Breeze" will put US warships within sight of Russian ports.

Nabucco West would have delivered non-Russian Caspian natural gas to Central and Southern European countries that have been looking for a way to circumvent Russia, which they believe was bullying them with its energy resources.

Could it be the case that nowadays we are facing, broadcast live, the opening for a new grammar for thinking and acting politically? Could rebellion, resistance and protest be no longer considered as the bitter spice of the institutional designs and state politics?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down the anti-communist revolution? Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy. Today it is “freedom and democracy” amerika that is copying Soviet practices during the cold war.

It was increasingly difficult to dispel the sense that Germans harbored, and continue to harbor, a good deal of Schadenfreude about the plight of the Greeks. The suddenly unhappy southerners, so the German thinking went, were being punished for their previous hedonism.

The West had treated Nikolic as something of a leper because of his close collaboration with Hague-Tribunal indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj and his support of Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo—all despite the fact that he broke with Seselj, established his own political party and has strongly supported Serbia’s EU aspirations.

Because of his belief that his fight for democracy was assigned to him by a divine force (Misha was very religious), and that his dissident mission had global significance, some people perceived him as conceited and indeed as a megalomaniac.

To keep going forward as a nation, I believe it is fundamentally important to continue to pursue each one of the four in a complementary and holistic manner—and to not sacrifice any one of them on the altar of furthering another.

But Putin did provide covert support to the rebels in an effort to keep them from being overrun. Most likely, he pursued this approach largely to protect his bargaining position, and that of eastern Ukraine, in any peace negotiations that might emerge.

Yanukovych's preferred outcome would be to put real limits on any continued economic and political integration with Moscow—while seeking an accommodation with the EU that would help Ukraine's economy but not challenge his political dominance of the country.

Because, if the logic of European integration has brought into question the value of democratic order in its historical, political and cultural sense, is it plausible to claim that contemporary reverse processes, will end differently? For now, however, such an objective possibility is opened, and it is proportional to participation of citizens i.e. to subjectivation and re-politization.

Neither EU, nor NATO have monopoly in European or world relations, be they economic, political or strategic. Serbia is member of most important international organizations, has many friends. Her interests and rights in Kosovo and Metohija are guaranteed by UN SC resolution 1244.

However, the government expenditures in Bangladesh are clearly lower than in Pakistan. Consequently the main factor is not the level of government spending but the way it is spent! For example Bangladesh’s per capita expenditure for defence is three times lower than that of Pakistan.

This ideological construct is the basis for the Western-sponsored doctrine, forced on a more or less reluctant United Nations, of “R2P”, the ambiguous shorthand for both the “right” and the “responsibility” to protect peoples from their own governments.

The election of Nikolic probably shows that enthusiasm for joining the EU is waning, which would make sense considering the current crisis of the euro zone. But even a sinking ship may look like salvation to a drowning man.

Since the clever stuff can go wrong, ballot-stuffing is a safety valve. Politicians in shoddy democracies are learning what leaders in real ones have long known—you can fool only some of the people, and only some of the time.

The traders were essentially double-dipping – getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn't have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans – that claim belonged to bond investors -- but they did so anyway and kept the money.